What is a liberal education and what part can science play in it? How should we think about the task of developing a curriculum? How should educational research conceive of its goals? Joseph Schwab's essays on these questions have influenced education internationally for more than twenty-five years.

Schwab participated in what Daniel Bell has described as the "most thoroughgoing experiment in general education in any college in the United States," the College of the University of Chicago during the thirties, forties, and fifties. He played a central role in the curriculum reform movement of the sixties, and his extraordinary command of science, the philosophy of science, and traditional and modern views of liberal education found expression in these exceptionally thoughtful essays.